Reactions

July 24th, 2011

When news of the terrible attacks in Norway came out, the inevitable discussions popped up on the right-wing discussion boards: it was obviously a Muslim terrorist, the kind enabled by stupid liberals and their multiculturalism–and certainly not a white guy:

Norway had recently charged a mullah for terrorism. This is payback. Maybe now the Scandinavian countries will stop their coddling of muslims.

Or, maybe they’ll be like Spain a few years back, and vote in a government that will give them more concessions.

Multiple Choice question Class:
Who did the Norwegian Bombing?

a) Islamic Extremists?
b) Disenfranchised American White Middle Class Males?
c) The Amish?
d) Christian Nuns?
e) Liberal enablers?

From Islam………… with love. (sarcasm) Maybe NOW they will round up those Muslim Bastards and send them back to Africa and Asia.

How’s that multiculturalism feel?

By definition, if you need to “go back in time” 16 years to find a white guy bomb-terrorist, they’re no longer a statistically significant threat. But moslems are.

They immediately started long discussions about how this exemplified how violent, intolerant, and soulless Islam is, how liberals allowed this to happen by embracing “peaceful” Islam, and how groups responsible for acts like this should be treated:

History will repeat itself when dark forces must be obliterated once again. People that have no stomach for this including liberals, get out of the way!

well Americans did forget 9/11 and decided to give Obama a chance

The Western World needs to do three things. They are difficult, but not impossible. They will be met with resistance, but they need to be done.

  1. Neutralize all imams, who are the sole source of moslem vitriol.
  2. Reduce the mosques to dust.
  3. Deport all moslem believers to their countries of origin.

I try to stay above the fray on most matters of high tension, but with today’s atrocity enough is enough. The West had better realize what it’s faced with and act before it’s too late. They’re coming and we have no plan nor backbone to stop it. sd

I agree. We need to find out who did this and execute them publicly. the next time there is an honor killing the men involved need to be castrated and then hung in public right in the middle of “rag town.” They must be harshly informed that they are no longer in a world that they have already ruined and that we are not going to stand by and let them destroy ours. We will not let it happen even if it means that we must eliminate or deport every last muslim in this country. It is time to lock and load and play cowboys and muslims!!!!! Don’t tell me how islam is a religion of peace. The only peace you will get from me is a piece of land to bury you in.

Even when reports started coming in that the people killed on Utoya Island were attending a Labor Party camp on an island, that the victims were leftists, the tone did not change–it perhaps even strengthened, with screeds against liberals and multiculturalism, irony that liberals suffered because of their own misguided tolerance, with more invective about what to do about the entire group identified with the terrorsist or terrorists behind all of it:

Muammar Khaddafi has already threatened to take the war to Europe. Islamic shock troops and fifth columnists have been in place throughout Europe for years. To the white people of Europe: You can run, but you can’t hide. So man up and kick these invaders out. No mercy. Because they shall surely show none to you.

Weren’t those the “Obama Youth” types at camp. These were kids that wholeheartely embraced the multicutural myth of appeasing Islam. Their leaders allow thousands of Muslims into their homeland every year, preaching diversity and tolerance. Wasn’t Norway the place that found that 100% of all forceable rapes were committed in their country last year (like 1356 of 136) were linked to Muslims? The same ideology that panders, like here in the US, will get you killed. Why are Liberals so f-ing stupid?

Muslims are no longer welcome in Amercia…

Bastards. Typical Islamic tactics. They like to fight unarmed kids and women. Bastards.

These bastards hsould NEVER have been “welcomed” in any western nation. They are modern day NAZIs.

As Stewie would say, How’s that multiculturalism working for you? Huh? Pretty good? Huh?

Then the reports came out: the perpetrator of the attacks was not a Muslim, nor a liberal–he was a gun-toting right-wing fundamentalist Christian who hated Muslims and multiculturalism:

He was described as a gun-loving, highly religious Norwegian obsessed with what he saw as the threat of multiculturalism and Muslim immigration to the cultural and patriotic values of his country.

“We are not sure whether he was alone or had help,” a police official, Roger Andresen, said at a televised news conference. “What we know is that he is right-wing and a Christian fundamentalist.”

In short, he was ideologically identical to these people who had been expounding on ways to punish the entire community the perpetrator had come from.

Oops.

News of this instantly turned the discussion on the same boards to worries about how liberals would take advantage of news like this, and that the liberal media would have a field day, epitomized by this cluelessly ironic expression of disgust with how the tragedy would be abused by the left wing to forward their ideological agendas:

Liberals love tragedies like these to exploit for their own political gain..they have NO soul

Yes. It would be horrific if someone took this news and used it as an example of how their political ideology is therefore supported.

Needless to say, from that point forward, there were no more posts about how the larger group the suspect belonged to should be punished in radical ways. Instead, people started to point out how this was a lone nut who had no connection to his community and so should be divorced from it–or even that he was an Arab sympathizer who was trying to weaken the conservative Christian community from within. Some even began to spin even this as somehow related to liberals:

The European right has more in common with the American left than it does with us.

very true… European “conservatives” also tend to resemble what we’d label democrats.

For those looking for false equivalencies, the liberal equivalent to the Free Republic boards would be the Democratic Underground or DailyKos; their reactions were far less vitriolic and political. A few supposed about Islamic or right-wing suspects, but for the most part there was worry over the casualties and what this would mean for Norway’s future.

And yes, I know the Freepers are extremists–but it gives a good insight into the right-wing echo chamber. What is said there is, in many ways, the uninhibited heart and soul of right-wing America.

  1. stevetv
    July 24th, 2011 at 17:00 | #1

    I won’t deny that my first thought during the bomb blasts was “jihadists”, partly because a car bomb was used and partly because he hit the HQ of the magazine that published the incindiary Muhammad editorial cartoons. I think we should take into consideration the possibility that that’s exactly how he planned it, too, that he wanted to ape Islamic terrorist techniques and go after targets they would have gone after as a statement of sorts. As for the rest, it’s just the usual rationalizations by the uptight and anxiety prone, but it begs the question: why in the world would anyone spend time reading the Free Republic’s comments section??? I mean, thank you for being our filter, but you don’t have to punish yourself.

    Also, I’m not seeing much compelling evidence that he was a Christian fundy, not yet. Just a mere nationalist and racist is all. He’s probably too far to the left for some of the Freepers.

  2. Luis
    July 25th, 2011 at 00:15 | #2

    Steve:

    The difference here was not just that they assumed the perpetrator was Muslim, but that they then jumped on their high horses and rode them all the way into town, going on about how this proved all their worst fears about Islam, and how liberals were suicidal idiots for the multiculturalism thing, yadda yadda yadda. In short, as I pointed out, they used it as an example of how their political ideology is therefore supported, making brash statements about how a whole general group of people should be run out of town on a rail–very much like the whole “Ground Zero Mosque” thing and the continuing antagonism towards Muslims in America.

    And then, the moment they discovered it was one of them, suddenly the acts of a single person had nothing whatsoever to do with the group, and he was probably really a liberal anyway.

    As I mentioned, this is, in many ways, indicative of the uninhibited heart and soul of right-wing America. This is the raw source of what we see behind so much of the right-wing ideology and posturing. Peel away the thin veneer of usual right-wing speech and this is what so many of them feel at the core. Compare this to the lefties who treated this in a wholly different fashion.

    Assuming the perp was a Muslim is not the fairest thing to do, but is to a good degree understandable. I won’t get on anyone’s back on that aside from to say that you should always reserve comment until you know more about the facts you comment on. Now, had you not just assumed they were Muslims, but then gone on a long rampage about how this proved how Republicans had screwed up the war on terrorism… and then it turned out the perp was someone who probably was very much in line with your own politics, but took it to violent extremes… well, wouldn’t you feel the least bit sheepish? Or would you have blithely acted like you had not just done what you had done, and moved on to spinning the act so you could still rail about your political foes? I think what we saw there was rather significant, as it exemplifies the kind of thing that passes for “reasoning” and “judgment” on the right these days.

    As for spending time reading the Free Republic’s comments section, I don’t–but when I read about the acts of this person, and then that there was a lag before they found out who it really was, I know there would be something exactly like this. Sure enough, they lived up to every worst expectation, and more. But when I saw that comment where the guy whined about liberals loving this kind of tragedy to exploit for political gain, on the exact same forum where these very people had been doing that before it was revealed that the terrorist was their own ideological soulmate… well, the irony and hypocrisy were just far too great to pass up.

    As for Breivik being a Christian fundie, the Norwegian police certainly seem convinced; that was the report I was quoting from. He certain had a lot of other things in that line, including the focus on “multiculturalism,: a big keyword in that movement these days. He apparently posted on Fundie web sites as well. I feel relatively safe in the description.

  3. stevetv
    July 25th, 2011 at 01:49 | #3

    Yes, people should always reserve comment until we know more about the facts. But people don’t. It’s human nature. As of my writing this, we have no idea how Amy Winehouse died. There’s no official cause of death. But people have already made up their minds, and I’m 99 percent confident it was either an OD or deliberate suicide. Of course I could be wrong, but I can’t stop my brain from drawing conclusions based on how young she was and what we know about her. And when the public chatter is so dominated by “Beware the Islamic terrorists”, it’s only natural that even a highly tolerant person will reflexively think “Islamic terrorism”.

    But echo chambers are dangerous, as they repeat the same messages in slightly varied form for the easily susceptible. That’s why I’ll gladly pass up any opportunity to read the Freepers (and not because I’m susceptible, mind you).

    I don’t know if Norwegian police are convinced he’s a Xtain fundie. All I’m seeing is the one quote from the Norwegian official. If they do think that, well I’m also looking at the specifics and I disagree. I’m not sure I’d rely on the police to make these determinations. If I wanted to know if a criminal were a Muslim fundie, I sure as hell wouldn’t look to a NYC cop for that information. And instead of drawing inferences from code words like “multiculturism” (a word that may not hold the same nuances to Norwegian Christian fundies as it does to American Christian fundies; a word that produces tremendous disdain that’s not limited to religious fundamentalists, but to national and race extremists as well… and there is a very strong anti-multiculturalist underbelly throughout much of Europe that isn’t necessarily religion-based at all), I’d rather look for clues in the Personal Facts section towards the end of his manifesto. There’s no question that he’s a militant Christian but he’s devoted to Christianity more as a powerful monocultural body of influence, a variant of nationalism. But he seems not to care a wit for spritualism and would probably laugh if you asked him if Jesus was his guiding light. Plus “Christian fundamentalist” suggests he’s following a movement, but it looks to me like he was very much a free-thinker, a.k.a. a lone wolf.

    I think (and I blame media and pundits for this) we’re so quick to simplify things into one-or-the-other dichotomies without considering any complexities that lie in between. And because Islamic terrorism has in recent years been so highly motivated by religion (and this was not always so in the past), we’re blurring the distinctions between national fundamentalism and religious funamentalism. The I.R.A. were Catholic and many were devout, but who refers to them as Catholic extremists?

  4. Luis
    July 25th, 2011 at 10:39 | #4

    Looking at his manifesto, if one takes it at face value (and assumes he was the author of every part–parts are attributed to certain personalities and pseudonyms), then he was not a fundamentalist. That said, his focus on Christianity and Islam is rather deep, and he is definitely pro-Christian-supremacy, if not himself a Christian (Catholic, he doesn’t much like Protestants) with reservations.

    His politics, on the other hand, are unmistakable–vehemently right-wing. And here’s where self-definitions become a blurring aspect: he describes himself as a “moderate cultural conservative.” I’ve seen this before–conservatives identifying themselves as “moderates” or “centrists,” but at the same time embracing heavily extremist views. Many people don’t like to see themselves as extremists, and will even claim to have credentials on the side the passionately oppose. One has to wonder how much this applies to his statements on his religious underpinnings as well.

    One thing is clear: he despises Islam and Arabs with a passion. He hates feminists, Marxists, communists, multiculturalism, political correctness–and, second only to Muslims, he despises liberals. Although he cites a lack of religious devotion himself, and seems to fall short of total theocracy, he most definitely supports a society dominated by Catholicism, culturally and, to a point, militarily. Beyond that, many of his assertions are a confusing mix (he wants male dominance and is anti-feminist, but claims to hate mistreatment of women; he claims to be anti-racist, but favors blonde, blue-eyes “Nordic” genotypes and fears their subsumption into darker-skinned peoples).

    So, while he is not a religious fundamentalist himself, he nevertheless is still ideologically very much in line with the fundamentalists and right-wing extremists (thus explaining why he participated in their online forums), and in his hatred of Islam, he was very much the ideological twin to the people on the Free Republic site. And that, in the end, was the main point.

    I am therefore chastised for doing the next worst thing to making warrantless assumptions: believing initial news reports.

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